Book Event: Lisa Jewell’s “I Found You” Book Tour

Earlier this year I read Lisa Jewell’s The Girls in the Garden and really enjoyed it!  So when I found out that Lisa Jewell would be coming to a city near me on June 3rd for her U.S. book tour for I Found You, I quickly made plans to attend…

  This event was held at the Joseph-Beth Booksellers book store in Cincinnati OH.  If you live in (or near) Ohio, I highly recommend the Joseph-Beth bookstores as they hold some amazing author events!  In addition to the Cincinnati location, there are 2 stores in Kentucky and 3 locations in various hospitals throughout Ohio.

As I have done in the past with my other book/author event posts, I am going to share a few things I learned from Lisa Jewell during this event in bullet form…

» Lisa started writing in 1996 after she was laid off from her secretary job.   Interestingly enough, a journalist friend had asked her what she wanted to do with her life, and she mentioned she had always wanted to write a book.  This friend made her a deal that she would treat her to dinner at her favorite restaurant if Lisa would write 3 chapters of a book.  Lisa accepted this challenge & got to work and wrote the first chapters.  After reading those first 3 chapters, her journalist friend encouraged Lisa to send them off to a few agents.  Lisa sent them off to 10 agents and received 9 rejections.  One agent thought Lisa had some potential and picked her up.  After Lisa finished the book, her agent got her her first publishing deal through Penguin.

» She gets her book ideas while walking.

» Lisa is not a planner.  She comes up with an idea/concept, then just starts writing.  She gives a book up until the 50% mark to decide whether to keep going with the book, or dump it.

» It generally takes Lisa 3 months to write a book.

» Things went so smoothly while writing I Found You, that she hardly had to do any rewrites.

» Lisa writes 1,000 words per day.  Some days this only takes her an hour, others it takes 3+ hours.

» She has to get out of the house to write, and generally visits a café.

» Lisa’s favorite books that she has written are The House We Grew Up In and The Truth About Melody Browne.

» The House We Grew Up In seems to be quite popular in the U.S, but rarely gets mentioned in the U.K.

» One of her favorite authors is Maggie O’Farrell.

» Feels her book The Third Wife was her “transition book.”  She wasn’t satisfied with how it turned out.

» I Found You came about after she abandoned a book that was going to be about two people who connect in a suicide forum online that decide to meet up in real life.  After She abandoned this book idea, she couldn’t let go of one of the characters, this character becomes Alice in I Found You.

» Her next book, Then She Was Gone, comes out in the UK in July 2017, but won’t be out in the U.S. until April 2018.  It’s about a woman whose teen daughter disappears one day on her way to the library.  10 years later the mother meets a man with a 9 year-old daughter who is eerily similar to the daughter that went missing 10 years ago…

Have you read any of Lisa Jewell’s books?  If so, what did you think?

Do you have a favorite Lisa Jewell book?

Comment below and let me know 🙂